Metabolomics Facility

Application

The Metabolomics Facility of the University of Leiden has brought together two research groups from the Faculty of Science that are well-known for their expertise in two different fields: the Biomedical Metabolomics Facility Leiden, experts in clinical metabolomics and the Natural Products Laboratory, one of the pioneers in plant and herbal medicine metabolomic research.

Metabolomics is the profiling of, ideally, all low molecular mass (<2000 Da) molecules found in tissues, cells or biofluids of living organisms. It is a powerful tool that can be used to study the metabolism and metabolic processes, specifically allowing the identification of individual metabolites (biomarkers) or patterns that can be associated to certain states or conditions of organisms.

Given its great potential as a powerful technology to resolve fundamental biological issues, it has attracted increasing interest throughout the past two decades. Based on a holistic approach, it has found applications in the most diverse fields, including drug discovery and clinical studies in the pharmaceutical industry, crop disease management, agrochemical and food industry, toxicology and safety assessment, and environmental toxicology among many others.

Because of the need to detect a wide range of compounds, no single analytical technique can provide all necessary information. And even if it were possible to obtain whole metabolic profiles of samples, it is necessary to count on expertise in each field to be able to analyse, interpret and find a biological meaning for all the data provided by these methods.

For this reason, the Metabolomics Facility of the University of Leiden has brought together two research groups from the Faculty of Science that are well-known for their expertise in two different fields: the Biomedical Metabolomics Facility Leiden, experts in clinical metabolomics and the Natural Products Laboratory, one of the pioneers in plant and herbal medicine metabolomic research.

This joint facility boasts a very complete array of analytical technology, including high-resolution NMR instrumentation, GC/UHPLC/LC instruments hyphenated to diverse mass spectrometry detectors (Q-Tof, Ion-trap, triple quadrupole). This complete analytical platform, coupled to advanced extraction techniques, sample prep methods and vast experience, allows the Metabolomic Facility of Leiden University to offer non-targetted or targetted metabolomic studies, metabolomic fingerprinting or footprinting studies. We are open to discuss any potential application and find the best and most appropriate approach.

The facility is used for measurements for the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) and the Erasmus Medical Center and leading clinics in the US such as the Mayo Clinic. It is also working closely with international companies such as Janssen Pharmaceutica and Unilever. Also, a number of companies on the BioScience Park uses the metabolomics facility as Astellas , ZF -screens, Inovo , and the Centre for Human Drug Research.

The facility is a cooperation between the BioMedical Facility of the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research and the Natural Products Laboratorium of the Institute of Biologie Leiden and offers scientists and companies access to a unique combination and expertise.